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“I’ll save all my romanticism for my inner life…”1

1In mid-2020, in the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic which saw much of the world placed under lockdown – as individuals and families, confined to their homes, watched a virus rip through the population; as strangers and loved ones alike were turned into abstract televised statistics; and as the hallmarks of the capitalist economy, labour and the quest for endless economic growth, hit an unprecedented and indefinite pause – as this calamity unfolded, British Romantic poetry, particularly the early poetry of William Wordsworth, made an equally unprecedented return to the forefront of Western popular culture.

2Between July and December of 2020, in the heart of the lockdowns, Taylor Swift released two albums and a single – folklore, “the lakes”, and evermore2 – which made shared recourse, in certain lyrics, in their covers and music videos, and in “a marketing campaign as unsubtle as the music itself was delicate”, to a motif of rural retreat.3 This was a gesture away from urban modernity towards a utopian rural idyll: a constantly voiced aspiration, as Kathryn Bromwich puts it, “to escape to a cabin in the woods, to reconnect with nature”.4 I will argue in the first section of this article, focusing on the manifesto-like “the lakes”, that Swift’s use of the rural retreat motif might be placed in the long tradition of the pastoral mode, particularly in the line, inaugurated by Virgil’s Eclogues, of a pastoral self-conscious of its being “of the country but by and for the court or city”.5

3These productions were also suffused, however, with references to Wordsworth, particularly to his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads6: at their most explicit in “the lakes”, Swift’s puns and references led to “her legions of adoring fans of all ages Googling ‘Wordsworth’ and coming into contact with Romantic Poetry”.7 But I will argue that Swift’s engagement with the earlier collection runs deeper than mere mentions of Windermere peaks. Lyrical Ballads has also been taken as an important intervention in the pastoral mode, one in which the realities of rural labour – normally the purview of the georgic mode – encounter and engage with the typical characteristics of pastoral, producing a modified mode which has been named by turns “hard pastoral”, “georgic pastoral”, or the “pastoral-georgic”.8 I argue that throughout folklore and evermore, Swift’s engagements with the Lyrical Ballads represent a modification of the traditional pastoral motif of rural retreat, producing her own version of a Wordsworthian georgic pastoral. The general question of this article is thus: what, in the context of 2020, might a leading lyricist’s recourse not only to a motif of pastoral rural retreat, but to a specifically Wordsworthian variation on this motif, signify?

4To approach an answer, from the second section of this article onwards I will first outline, through a reading both of certain Ballads and the 1800 “Preface”,9 Wordsworth’s creation of a georgic pastoral, arguing that this modified mode represented an attempt to consider the material changes to labour relations at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and their effects on the mental capacities of labourers to create communities of care. I will then outline the importance, in 2020, of the pastoral mode in relation to labour concerns by demonstrating that Swift’s relation to Wordsworth is mediated by the presence of another pastoral movement, the online aesthetic of cottagecore. Finally, through a comparative reading of folklore’s “seven” and Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven”, I will demonstrate that Swift’s engagement with Wordsworth allows her to approach the question of community and care in the context of our contemporary labour relations.

Swift’s Motif of Rural Retreat and the Pastoral Tradition

5To approach the contemporary significance of a Wordsworthian variation on pastoral, I will begin by establishing the relation of Swift’s folklore era10 to the pastoral mode in general, and establishing what any pastoral, never mind a variation, might have signified in 2020. As Terry Gifford notes, pastoral – defined at its broadest as “any literature that describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban” – is traditionally organised around “a discourse of retreat which may […] either simply escape from the complexities of the city, the court, the present, ‘our manners’, or explore them”11: it is such a motif of retreat that structures the folklore era as a whole. It is important to note that this motif does not present equally, or in quite the same way, across the two albums in their entirety.12 There are songs in which it seems entirely absent – folklore’s opener “the 1”, for instance – and it is difficult to discern in others. But it remains the central motif of the era as a whole, suffusing the albums’ visual and musical aesthetic and shimmering, fractured into discrete aspects, through many of their lyrics. I will turn to some of these fragmented manifestations further on, but first I will address the motif at its purest: these different fragments of pastoral are expressed as a whole in “the lakes”, and it is here that we might best establish what kind of pastoral retreat Swift models throughout the folklore era.13

6I begin with the chorus:

Take me to the Lakes, where all the poets went to die;
I don’t belong, and my beloved neither do you.
Those Windermere peaks seem like the perfect place to cry;
I’m setting off, but not without my muse.14

7This refrain offers us a movement towards rurality, specifically in the form of the titular Lakes, and I will attend to the evident intertextual importance of this deixis at the beginning of the next section. But for now I will consider the song’s Lakeland location as functioning primarily as a signifier of generalised, idealised rurality. The song’s world, with its “wisteria”, its “auroras”, its “red roses” and its “cliffside pools”, bears little resemblance to the real rural landscape of Cumbria15; it is an idealised rurality, a Theocritean idyll. It is also an as-yet unrealised landscape, appearing only in a series of aspirations and desires, always as a potential alternative.

8The verses and bridge flesh this out, directly addressing the society to which the Lakeland idyll represents an alternative:

I’m not cut out for all these cynical clones,
These hunters with cell phones.
[…]
I want to watch wisteria grow right over my bare feet,
’Cause I haven’t moved in years.
[…]
A red rose grew up out of ice-frozen ground,
With no one around to tweet it.16

9Digital society, here, produces a cynicism in which moments of beauty and life, the “red rose”, are hunted down to be displayed in the trophy cabinet of social media, in an ever-more-rapid whirlwind which does not allow for the wistful, wisteria-wound stillness the speaker craves.17 It is only through her retreat towards an idealised rurality that the speaker might engage fully with, “bathe in”, the depths of her inner life, her “calamitous love and insurmountable grief”, these emotions cheapened or quashed in her reality18: the Lakeland idyll becomes a “refuge” from the digitalised world at large.19

10“the lakes” thus offers us a clear instance of rural retreat, one we might place into a specifically Virgilian pastoral tradition. The song focuses broadly on what Paul Alpers would call a “representative anecdote”, established in “the opening lines of Theocritus’ first idyll”.20 Two figures, the speaker and her “muse”, are pictured (even if only aspirationally) inhabiting a landscape not only “idyllic”, but which functions as a “setting for song”.21 The need for a “muse” to complete this “perfect place to cry” implies that this landscape might allow for vocal expression of sorts, a kind of keening. Just as “[i]n the pastorals of Theocritus, Virgil, and their Renaissance imitators, shepherds gather at noon in what is both fictionally and metaphorically a space for exchanging conversation and song”,22 so do Swift’s modern shepherd-equivalents.23 This is also a temporal space: the song’s bridge (lines 16-23) emphasises long, uninterrupted stretches of time, enough time for wisteria to curl over someone’s feet, enough time to watch a rose emerge from the ground and flower above the ice. This is a feeling of otium, of “ease; inactivity”,24 expressed here as unhurriedness: the speaker hopes to “liv[e] in a ‘timeless’ present, [her] otium an expanded, blissful moment”.25 On a smaller scale we have the second verse:

What should be over burrowed under my skin,
In heartstopping waves of hurt.26

11Here, the speaker contrasts her own condition, in which her hurt stretches, works itself out over time, to an unspecified “should” which places a limit on her grief – in Alpers’ terms, a “thoroughly unpastoral urgency”.27

12Despite the Theocritean idealisation of this space for song, both in temporal terms and in the landscape terms addressed above, we cannot quite read “the lakes” as “escapist”, as representing a “refuge” in Roger Sales’ strict terms: the song is far too explicit about the society its speaker eschews. In this sense, the song imitates Theocritus, “but it qualifies its imitation by the initiating political [in our case societal] circumstances (completely absent from Theocritus)”.28 It “presents otium in circumstantial terms”29, representing the retreat from the digital world, a retreat towards broad stretches of unhurried time and landscapes consonant with inner feelings, as the conditions for the production of pastoral song.

13There is also a linguistic element: far from associating the rural landscape with simplified language as most pastorals do (including those of Wordsworth, as we will see below),30 the language of Swift’s pastoral song becomes near-baroque, particularly in comparison to most contemporary popular music.31 In the context of a Virgilian pastoral, in which the pastoral song and the conditions of its production function to critique the society that must be retreated from to attain those conditions,32 this becomes a reversal of pastoral’s traditional “linguistic borderland” between “the sophisticated discourse of the court and the illiterate discourse of the real shepherd”33: today it is the court, understood in the song’s terms as digitalised society, which tends towards the illiterate; to retreat from it is to open up the conditions for a sophisticated language adequate to the “heartstopping waves” of feeling the speaker yearns to express.

14Pulling this together, Swift’s Virgilian pastoral thus functions as a classic critique of urbanity, but one focused particularly on the digital. It is not surprising that this appeared in the context of 2020: folklore has been called “the quintessential lockdown album”,34 and Swift’s turn to rurality in general has frequently been associated with this historical moment. But it also contextualises her association, in “the lakes”, of pastoral’s “urban” with digital society; thrown without any choice into the world of social media, Swift retreats to rurality in order to “explore” its “manners”,35 to deplore its haste, its “brain rot”,36 its preclusion of the space, the otium, necessary for expression. But another lingering contradiction in Swift’s pastoral deepens this reading: the mournfulness of her pastoral landscape.37 Idyllic though it may be, it is a land of death; not where the poets lived but where they “went to die”, a condition unusual for the pastoral,38 but far more explicable in the context of the pandemic.

15Sarah Montin, in an excellent article from 2024, identifies “a surprising return to the pastoral aesthetic or a form of pastoralism in the face of” the pandemic.39 Not only, Montin argues, did pastoral offer respite from the intense urbanity or sub-urbanity of the lockdowns, but it proved “a relevant poetic mode with which to engage with the immediate and chaotic experience of pandemic and, at its heart, the momentous occasion of mass death”.40 Jacqueline Saphra’s “Sonnet 34”, one of the anthologised pandemic poems read by Montin, mirrors, I think, “the lakes”’s relation to death:

There’s only grief
to guide the times; no wreath, no ritual,
but from the distant hills a white wind blows
the grace of flowers and the scent of rose.41

16Here, as Montin reads it, “pastoral rhetoric” allows for a mourning otherwise “meaningless” within the “utilitarian world”.42 Likewise, if we understand the mournfulness of “the lakes” in relation to its Virgilian focus on the conditions for song, and indeed to my earlier reference to “keening”, we might understand the otium of Swift’s pastoral retreat as offering space to mourn, to keen, to express an “insurmountable grief” for which the digital world has no space. This link is solidified by folklore’s “epiphany”: so slow-moving instrumentally as to be nearly ambient, melody provided only by sparse piano notes and Swift’s vocals, later by a lone martial horn, its graceful otium provides the space for an extended metaphor in which the pandemic is collapsed into the Pacific theatre, an attempt “to make some sense of what you’ve seen”.43 It is a moment of breath.

17As this comparison suggests, several of “the lakes”’s pastoral features find themselves scattered throughout the era, even if they never appear again at the same time. The motif of retreat itself recurs most strongly: we find it in the isolated “holiday house” to which Rebekah Harkness and then the speaker retreat in “the last great american dynasty”, in the lost hometown of “exile” and the hometowns returned to in “dorothea”, “gold rush” and “’tis the damn season”, in the return to a lost youth played out in the “cardigan”–“august”–“betty” cycle, in “coney island” as a space for rumination on loss, and in the verdant cottage and village imagery of “willow” and “ivy”.44 It structures the music video for “cardigan”, the era’s first single. In John McGrath’s account, we begin “in a log cabin replete with open fire”, in which

a singer, wearing what appears to be an antebellum nightdress, is serenading us on a battered old piano, before suddenly she opens the top of the instrument and climbs in, all the time enveloped in an enchanted golden powder. She reappears in a mythic forest imbued with vivid green hues and vibrant, saturated moss.45

18Here, the pastoral landscape is given more typical form, one shared by the most important visual documents of the era, the album covers. For folklore, Swift stands dwarfed by tall trees on a hillside; for evermore, in a warm lumberjack’s plaid, she faces away from the camera and towards a row of trees. These documents, when understood in relation to the era’s many individual retreats and to the pastoral manifesto of “the lakes”, signify at the outset of any listen the context of the album at hand, a context of isolation in nature and rurality.

19This understanding of the entire era as being structured around the pastoral mode is strengthened by its other consistent characteristic: while the lyrics may or may not represent rurality or retreat, the albums’ instrumentals are consistent in their “minimalist indie-folk esthetic”.46 While, as McGrath notes, “the record [folklore] as a whole does not shy away from employing electric instruments and synthesizers”, these are kept to the background. Rather, the era foregrounds an “analogue semiotic” in which the emphasis is placed always on the acoustic. evermore’s country tinge leans even further into this emphasis on the acoustic. This emphasis is combined with a consistently languorous pace to give musical shape to the otium outlined in “the lakes”: not only is the music typically slow and relaxing, but it offers a great deal of space to Swift’s lyricism. The album’s music itself thus reflects “the lakes”’s pastoral, retreating from the digital towards a typically rural acoustic and folk aesthetic which opens up the conditions for Swift’s pastoral song.47

20And as in “the lakes”, this space for song across the era becomes equally a space for mourning – as we have already seen in the brief description of the musical background to “epiphany”. We find this particular aspect of “the lakes” reflected further, however, in various lyrics from the era, in the seemingly posthumous “hoax” – “after they pulled me apart” – and the extended elegy for Rebekah Harkness in “the last great american dynasty”; in the “old widow go[ing] to the stone every day” and the speaker “grieving for the living” in “ivy”; and in the ambivalent loss in the repeated “after you” of “happiness”.48 It appears at its most affecting, perhaps, in “marjorie”, Swift’s memorial to her grandmother. “marjorie” is an extended act of mourning on the part of the singer, but Swift’s is not the only voice: in the background, the spacious, pastoral instrumental allows us to hear a recording of Marjorie herself, an opera singer, giving voice to her own disappearance.49 Swift’s pastoral tendencies throughout the folklore era, then, allow for a range of heartbreaking laments, a working-through of grief the space for which is denied in the world of the digital.50

Wordsworth’s Georgic Pastoral: Between labor and otium

21This run-through of the various manifestations of pastoral in Swift’s folklore era as a whole has served to emphasise the manner in which her rurality is a generalised one, more an imaginative space of otium than a real location. But, particularly in “the lakes”, Swift’s idyll is identified with a series of names and deictics which, while not fixing the lyrics to any realistic landscape, offer a further set of significations. The title itself refers to the English Lake District in the county of Cumbria, the home of Windermere and its peaks and also the home of William Wordsworth and the Lake School of Romantic poets. Swift ensures that we cannot miss this signification:

I’ve come too far to watch some name-dropping sleaze
Tell me what are my words worth.51

22But this connection to Wordsworth is not isolated, and other relations run deeper than this pun. As we shall see in the final section of this article, Swift’s “seven” bears a strong thematic resemblance to Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven”, and we might understand her “mad woman” as a response to the several mad women of Lyrical Ballads: these relations will show, I hope, that there is value in looking more closely at Swift’s relation to Wordsworth beyond the pun. In fact, I will argue in the final sections of this article that we ought to take “the lakes” at face-value: that Swift’s pastoral world is Wordsworthian not only in name but in nature.52

23To get there, though, we must first look at what constitutes a Wordsworthian pastoral. William Wordsworth has long been associated, both poetically and personally, with a motif of rural retreat. The grand narrative of his life, given shape both by The Prelude and by critics concerned with his times and his politics, is one of renounced radicalism, a youthful engagement with society surrendered after the failure of the French Revolution and a subsequent withdrawal first to Somerset and then finally to the Lakes, becoming the stately Sage of Rydal Mount.53 His writing followed the same course: the outright radicalism of the unpublished “Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff”, politically engaged on a national scale, is abandoned in favour of an apolitical verse drawing a moral from rural life, encapsulated by the Lyrical Ballads. In short, “Wordsworth the poet begins when Wordsworth the politically committed man ends”.54

24This view of Wordsworth’s political progression has rightly been shattered over decades of careful literary-historical scholarship, replaced by more careful considerations of his relation to material changes in his society.55 But Lyrical Ballads has retained, if not without complication, its position as a document of rural retreat, a manifestation of a certain pastoral impulse – a position Wordsworth himself, in fact, emphasised in the titles of five poems written after his arrival in Grasmere, and in the title of the subsequent 1802 edition, Lyrical Ballads with Pastoral and Other Poems.56 In this section I will briefly read Wordsworth’s Ballads as encapsulating the same motif of pastoral retreat as Swift’s folklore era, one deeply concerned with the society to which the pastoral world represented an alternative. But I will further show that, to adequately address the material changes happening around him, Wordsworth made recourse not only to the pastoral, but simultaneously to the georgic tradition, producing a hybrid “georgic pastoral” which, I will go on to argue, can be identified within Swift’s lyrics.

25The basic terms of Wordsworth’s pastoral are stated outright in the 1802 “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”:

Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated […].57

26Although Wordsworth frequently presents this focus on the rural as original, as an “empirical mimesis”58 of “the beautiful and permanent forms of nature”,59 it is essentially generic: “its central terms, essential, elementary, durable, permanent, and above all simplicity, belong to an idealized poetics and a Neoclassical theory of pastoral”.60 This Neoclassical theory, also referred to as primitivism, sought “to eject the ephemeral in favour of the essential”, and so “[t]he settings of poems, plays, paintings and even novels evoked a condition of society that was primitive and pre-social, in contrast to the luxuriousness which was seen as the characteristic of contemporary life in Western Europe”.61 Wordsworth’s pastoral retreat in the Ballads, then, is a means of critiquing the corruption through luxury of commercial society.62

27But the target of Wordsworth’s pastoral critique is not quite commercial society. As he was writing, the essentially agrarian commercial society of eighteenth-century Britain was transforming at terrifying speed into an urbanised, industrial society. Factories were appearing; cities were growing; a proletarian labour force was coming into being.63 In short, labour and what labour meant was undergoing a truly radical overhaul. It is in this context64 that we find that “[s]everal of the new poems of Lyrical Ballads (1800) are attempts to rethink the Virgilian categories of pastoral otium and georgic labor”.65 Bruce Graver has outlined this concern in his brilliant reading of “Michael: A Pastoral Poem”: “Wordsworth conceives of Michael”, his Lakeland shepherd, “as an ideal Virgilian agricola”,66 almost preternaturally hard-working; he and his household “were as a proverb in the vale / For endless industry”.67 But the poem concerns Michael’s role as father, in which he “weans his son away from natural childish play and disciplines him to a life of constant toil”.68 “[I]t is clear”, Graver writes, “that Wordsworth associates childish play with pastoral otium, and adult responsibility with georgic labor”: Luke’s moments of otium, entirely proper to a child, are rebuked, and trained out of him. Michael having been bound to his brother’s debts in surety, Luke is sent to the city to work, in order that Michael’s fields might be passed down to Luke. In his new surroundings of constant stimulation and easy otium, however, he

Began
To slacken in his duty, and at length
He in the dissolute city gave himself
To evil courses.69

28“Luke’s final dissolution and shame”, Graver concludes, “should thus come as no surprise: part of Michael’s failure, it seems, was his son’s joyless education”, an education which has predisposed the boy to take his pleasures where he finds them.70

29Wordsworth’s concerns about the ills of uninterrupted labour find voice in the “Preface” in his fears over “the increasing accumulation of men in cities” and “the uniformity of their occupations”.71 We might thus understand this turn to complex meditations on the georgic value of labor as a response to the growing prominence of the factory system, and its ever-increasing demand for unbroken stretches of labour.72 But the continued influence of the pastoral mode and the pastoral value of otium pushes Wordsworth’s georgic pastoral critique of industrial labour in a particular, characteristic direction: Wordsworth moves away from the economic and towards the mental effects of this social development. The new factory jobs, Wordsworth writes in the 1800 “Preface”, “are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor […and] a craving for extraordinary incident”.73 For David Simpson, then, the primary stated aim of Wordsworth’s experiment in the Ballads – to prove that “the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants”74 – is no less than an attempt to negatively critique the “dulling and soporific”75 effect of factory labour on the imaginative and sympathetic mental capacities of labourers. John Rieder has traced a similar trajectory through Wordsworth’s rewritings of the Salisbury Plain poems: as his focus moves from politics to sympathies, it becomes clear that for Wordsworth “the constitution of community has become a question concerning [the] essentially private, individual, and finally internal acts of communicating and understanding” that are degraded by the division of labour.76 In “Michael”, Luke’s excessively georgic education leads to his dissolution, the consequence of which is the sale “into a Stranger’s hand” of the fields Michael wished to pass down. In the context of an age in which tradition and inheritance were essential aspects of community,77 this narrative signifies the dissolution of a farming community caused by the disposition to spectacle and idleness produced by an excess of labor. It figures in miniature, then, the broader dissolution of community ties Wordsworth feared from the rise of factory labour.

30This is the import of Wordsworth’s hybrid georgic pastoral: his concern for labour conditions requires the introduction of georgic labour to the pastoral landscape, but he returns to a deeply pastoral concern for community.78 It seems, of course, a million miles away from Taylor Swift’s idealised landscapes and relaxed music, but through the next section I will demonstrate that Swift’s lyrics in fact show a pronounced concern for labour, both through direct and indirect representation. Before this, however, I would like to quickly address the instrumental context for this representation, a context which – expanding on my reading of Swift’s pastoral in the previous section – demonstrates a pervading atmosphere not only of pastoral, but of georgic pastoral.

31John McGrath has demonstrated the album’s tendency towards acoustic instrumentals and an indie-folk style, a tendency which signifies a certain removal from popular trends, and an element of otium. McGrath’s own reading, however, takes this tendency in the opposite direction. He understands it as appealing to the “analog freedom promised by craft – working with materials, your hands”; a popular “move toward the handmade” is reflected in the weight and texture of hand-played instruments79: folklore opens with light piano chords which are left to sustain, their overtones occupying a distant space80; the shift in intensity in “seven”’s second verse is signalled by the introduction of clearly live drums (a hi-hat subtly opened and closed as it is played, a sway-and-pull effect electronically irreplicable) on top of the metronomic drum machine underpinning the music; several songs across the era are driven by a fingerpicking pattern which not only emphasises the acoustic instrument, but its organic connection to the performer. As McGrath notes, in the “cardigan” video we even see Swift “visibly performing on piano” in a nod to this human connection,81 and the “long pond studio versions” strip the compositions back even further, the open, spacious recording emphasising scrapes and incidentals, and the performances filmed.82 What this emphasises is no less than labor: an emphasis on craft, on the worked, which not only accompanies but produces an atmosphere of otium.

Swift’s Georgic Pastoral: Labour and Community

Swift’s folklore era certainly makes more direct references to labour than is typical of her oeuvre as a whole. It recurs as a means of fleshing out characters: the unnamed point B of her “invisible string” (presumably Joe Alwyn) is introduced at “sixteen at the yogurt shop / [He] used to work at to make a little money”; Este’s vengeful friend “has cleaned enough houses to know how to cover up a scene” in “no body, no crime”; and the popular perception of Rebekah Harkness’s relationship with Bill Harkness is defined through their differing relations to business and labour.83

32But we might also cast a wider net for depictions of labour which fall outside the norms adhered to by the examples at this section’s beginning, and it is another Wordsworthian intertext which points the way. I briefly suggested above that folklore’s “mad woman” makes a titular nod to several of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads – “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman”, “The Mad Mother”, and “The Thorn”. This in itself seems a reach, but we might compare their approaches to the theme of mad women, approaches which emphasise (in keeping with my reading of the Ballads) the conditions which produced this mental effect. “No one likes a mad woman”, Swift writes; “you made her like that”.84 But it is another line which roots the song in a more social context: “[d]oing your dirtiest work for you”.85 Although the song presents it in a different context, the general image of a woman doing a man’s dirty work, in a song concerned with the conditions which might drive a woman “mad”, is resonant, and can inform our reading of another important song in the era, “tolerate it”.86 The speaker of that song has a “dagger in [her]”, and bears “the weight” of her partner87: she suffers, and the song’s defining sound is the dramatic, lamenting swoop of Swift’s voice, a cry to introduce the chorus’s emotional outpouring; but the condition of this agony is depicted throughout as labour. Swift places her speaker in the position of a domestic labourer, her burdens depicted as housework: she “[l]ay[s] the table with the fancy shit”, “polish[es] plates until they glisten”, watches her partner, looking out, like a servant, for where to help him.88 But she also “sit[s] and listen[s]”, “greet[s him] with a battle hero’s welcome”, “made [him her] temple, [her] mural, [her] sky”.89 These are acts of labour, of what Nancy Fraser calls the “affective” dimension of reproductive labour, directed towards “the creation and maintenance of social bonds”,90 and this, I think, is the primary form of labour with which Swift is concerned throughout the folklore era. This ought not to be surprising: in Wordsworth’s georgic pastoral, the pastoral elements of the hybrid mode direct texts addressing labour towards concerns around community and its conditions of possibility, and in Swift’s own injection of georgic into the pastoral mode, we see the same concern reappear across the era.

33I would like to spend the remainder of this article, however, more closely analysing two more songs, evermore’s “ivy” and folklore’s “seven”. These songs represent, I believe, the most Wordsworthian extreme of Swift’s georgic pastoral: the first mirrors more closely than “tolerate it” the structure of Wordsworth’s critique of labour relations, and the second, I will argue, stands in rich dialogue with Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven”, using the earlier text to critique the social relations of our own time. Beyond that intertextual relationship these are not obvious choices: neither shares the rich depiction of labour found in “tolerate it”, and neither makes any clear reference to the world outside its formal bounds. But to demonstrate that in employing a specifically Wordsworthian mode, the georgic pastoral, and direct references to Wordsworth’s own uses of that mode, these songs critique her society, I will turn to one more intertext which will allow us to understand the even more abstracted references to labour relations within them, an intertext already very well acknowledged in accounts of the folklore era91 (note particularly the relevance of the cottage which features in the “cardigan” and “willow” videos).

34The cottagecore aesthetic92 has flourished on social media platforms such as Tumblr, TikTok, and to a lesser degree Instagram from around 2018, with some sources dating its identifying hashtag back to 2014.93 The aesthetic is centred around the depiction of idealised rural settings, “such as cozy kitchens, gardens, and open fields”,94 as brief escapes from modern life – particularly and explicitly from the digital world.95 In this sense, cottagecore has often been read as a perfect Theocritean pastoral, a movement of pure escape.96 But what tends to be depicted within these ideal cottages is not pure otium, although it partakes of a distinct atmosphere of otium (light guitar background music or soft Satie-esque piano, slow cuts or pans, frequent depictions of light building and fading through the day). Rather, cottagecore is nearly constantly concerned with craft labour. Whether artisan – small-scale handcraft production, not limited to baking, embroidery, or lacemaking – or reproductive – the making and mending of clothing, “cooking with natural ingredients”,97 baking, or foraging98 – this labour is carried out by hand, almost always by a single producer, and typically produces a single use-object or small batch.

35The “bucolic isolationism” of most cottagecore content, however – this emphasis on the singular producer – stands within a “dialectic […] between community and isolation”.99 Angelica Frey has noted that cottagecore adopts the early-modern pastoral trope of the “invitation”100: the individual producer shares her produce with the invitee (the viewer), producing a miniature model of production and circulation all contained within the imaginative domestic space of the titular cottage.

36It is this form, abstracted – an enclosed domestic space containing labourer and consumer – that appears in “ivy”, in dialogue with Swift’s concern, already noted, for affective reproductive labour. “ivy” tells of an affair which may or may not yet have happened, its ember glowing under the speaker’s husband’s very gaze, through the juxtaposition of two domestic spaces: the oppressive married household in which the husband looms, full of threat (“he’s gonna burn this house to the ground”), and the “house of stone” constructed in the speaker’s “dreamland”, a place of togetherness in which the lover’s “ivy grows”.101 These spaces are associated with the same kind of labour, but fail or flourish under vastly different conditions. In the first, the care labour which ought to hold together the speaker’s marriage is compared to mourning: “the old widow goes to the stone every day / But I don’t, I just sit here and wait, / Grieving for the living”.102 The widow’s mourning is active and engaged; the speaker’s is an act of surrender. Contrast this with the successful connections sketched in the chorus, which figures the speaker’s relation to her lover: here her “pain fits in the palm of [their] freezing hand”,103 and their ivy intertwines itself amongst her stones. The latter is associated with a release, the relaxation of a guard – the speaker “can’t / stop” the connection.104 This sense of surrender to inevitability is accentuated by the “but” statements which describe the lover, “tarnished but so grand” and “magnificently cursed”, which is to say cursed, and yet magnificent.105 This acceptance is redolent of otium.

37But as ever in the georgic pastoral, this otium is conditional. Where the lover is all touch, the husband is associated with sight, just waiting to find the lovers out.106 In this role he seems to mirror Wordsworth’s Michael, waiting, in a context of failing labor, for these little moments of otium, ready to burn them down.107 Like Michael, he is a disciplinarian, a term which has particular importance in the context of Swift’s cottagecore intertext. Ryan and Tileva have stressed the importance of cottagecore’s frontier imagery, imagery strongly shared by evermore in particular108: the frontier in cottagecore, particularly in the context of its primarily queer audience, represents freedom from the disciplinary centres of the metropolis, freedom (in its seclusion) from the policing of sexuality.109 But we might connect this also to cottagecore’s structure of labour relations within a domestic space, and its emphasis on the analogue: cottagecore labour is isolated within the walls of the cottage and far from the urban centres of manufacture, and cut off from the disciplinary electronic fingers of the gig and home-working economies, the “phones pinging constantly with updates, [the] urgent work emails”, or indeed the Slack notifications or Uber ringtones, that Isabel Slone identifies as cottagecore’s outside.110 But the husband remains a looming figure of discipline within the cottage-world of “ivy”, and so the moments of release, of otium, imagined in the song’s chorus remain virtual, in potentia. If we lay these various readings of the cottage image atop one another – if we read the text of “ivy”’ as existing in a continuum of georgic pastorals, running from Wordsworth through to cottagecore, with their accumulating responses to their contemporary labour relations – we might understand Swift’s song as gesturing to the conditions of possibility of a certain kind of affective reproductive labour, a caring, connecting labour impossible under the gaze of the disciplinarian. What may remain frustratingly abstract here, however, is made more explicit in “seven”, precisely through Swift’s direct references to the song’s Wordsworthian precursor.

38“seven”, even without the nods and winks of “the lakes”, is Swift’s clearest and deepest engagement with Wordsworth. “We Are Seven” is a simple ballad which speaks of an interaction between an adult and a “little cottage girl”: the child insists on her family comprising seven siblings, despite the fact that “[t]wo of us in the church-yard lie”.111 She sticks to this statement through all the adult’s rational protestations “[a]nd said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’”112 While it may seem some distance from this poem of rural simplicity to the hazy childhood of “seven”, the basic motions are in fact the same. “seven” concerns the speaker, remembering herself at that age, and her relationship with her friend, a young girl¹¹³ whose “dad is always mad”, and whom she imaginatively whisks away on far adventures so she “won’t have to cry / Or hide in the closet”.114 In both texts, a child reaches out and makes a connection, produces a moment of solidarity, where an adult simply cannot.

39I will soon come back to “seven”’s Wordsworthian intertext, but first I will outline its similarities to “ivy”, and thus its shared debt to cottagecore. Like the twinned domestic spaces of “ivy”, the world of “seven” is thoroughly isolated: the speaker partakes of some external environments (to which I will return), but the bulk of the song’s interactions take place within the space of a house, or at least a household:

I’ve been meaning to tell you,
I think your house is haunted,
Your dad is always mad, and that must be why.115

40We are presented here with another enclosed domestic setting for the song’s cast of characters, and against which they take on particular characterisations. The “dad”, here, is the operative figure, “always mad”. Mad must be taken as angry, surely, but the song’s perspective, although retrospective, is that of a child: a “mad” parent is a disciplinary figure, more surely still than the patriarchal partners of “ivy” and “tolerate it”. The father is another Michael, a disciplinary figure who snuffs the embers of otium from a child’s life. As in “ivy”, the affective labour of empathising, of creating social bonds, is to be carried out in a working environment overseen by a disciplinary figure – these relations rendering social bonds in “ivy” purely potential.

41But this is not the only possible signification of the father within “seven”, and I will return now to Swift’s debt to Wordsworth to expand our understanding of this disciplinarian figure. “We Are Seven” is, like other Ballads such as “Anecdote for Fathers”, a sustained juxtaposition of two very different figures, the adult and the child, and particularly of their understandings of the loss of two of the child’s siblings. While the child’s understanding has been referred to as a “pathetic inability” to comprehend loss,116 the poem concerns itself not with understandings of death but with understandings of community. The adult’s understanding of the loss is entirely practical: “You run about, my little maid”, he says; “If two are in the church-yard laid, / Then ye are only five”.117 His cold arithmetic is concerned with what these siblings can do: indeed, there is not only an element of accounting in his maths, but of management in his emphasis on the children as pure bodies, present or not present. This is a kind of georgic approach to community, one redolent if not of labor, then of negotium, an attitude which places the facts of nature in service to man.118 The attitude of the child which so troubles the adult is one deeply untroubled by such practical matters. Describing her siblings’ graves, the child states that

My stockings there I often knit,
My ’kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit –
I sit and sing to them.119

42The connection and community the child maintains is connected here to a kind of otium, the kind that turns domestic labour into a quasi-pastoral setting for song, an association reinforced by her “rustic, woodland air”.120 This split maps neatly onto that explored by Graver in “Michael”: the adult is associated with georgic labor, with an excess of it, and the child with an otium which troubles and offends the georgic adult.

43This has two consequences for our reading of “seven”: it will firstly allow us to place its georgic pastoral within a broader social context – one very similar, in the end, to that of Wordsworth’s – and it will then allow us to draw a direct line between Wordsworth’s social message in “We Are Seven” and Swift’s. If we are to understand “seven” as I believe it should be understood, as a contemporary response to “We Are Seven”, then we might map the earlier poem’s georgic / pastoral dichotomy onto “seven”’s active characters, and read the father as a georgic figure, and the speaker’s younger self as pastoral. This tracks, certainly for the speaker: she has an existence outwith the domestic space and its various georgic interactions; in the song’s opening lines she pleads that we

Please picture me
In the trees
I hit my peak at seven
Feet, in the swing
Over the creek.121

44We encounter her before she “learns civility”122; she is, like Wordsworth’s “little cottage girl”, a rustic, a figure of play and otium. The father may not initially seem like a georgic figure – indeed, he appears so little that it is hard to label him as anything. And yet if we continue to understand the labour with which Swift is concerned as affective reproductive labour, he becomes, in his very failure, a labouring figure within the same kind of domestic space that frames the affective labour of the figures in “tolerate it” and “ivy”: the central point of “seven” is that its speaker can create a social bond with the suffering young girl where others cannot, least of all the father. He terrorises her, terrorises where he ought to relate, to love. Like the speaker of “ivy” within her married domestic space, he fails to perform the affective labour that would pull together a family, would pull the girl out of her pain.

45But he is not subject to any disciplinarian gaze, like the speaker of “ivy” (indeed, he remains the disciplinarian himself, an overdetermined figure in a strongly overdetermined text). In the framework set up in my reading of cottagecore, this ought to allow his labour to attain a sense of otium, an atmosphere that ought to allow him to create social bonds. Evidently this is not the case. Rather, he cannot perform his affective labour because he is subject to a haunting,123 the influence of vague and abstract forces. But, although this is presented as the naïve and superstitious view of a child, we need not read it as such: rather, in the context of cottagecore’s microcosmic, moss-tinged economy, this haunting has a resonance. Cottagecore’s model of production and circulation is direct, its model of analogue artisan production and sharing rather than trade bypassing two great figures of virtuality, or of ghostliness. The first of these is old, existing, if not yet identified, in Wordsworth’s lifetime: the “gespenstige gegenständlichkeit”, the “ghostly objecthood”,124 in Marx’s famous terms, of value. The newer virtuality is the digital, virtual world itself, the world into which the circulation of value has disappeared from sight (already explicitly expelled from cottagecore’s idyll). Fredric Jameson has noted the sheer abstraction of our vast digital webs of circulation and finance,125 networks that “determin[e] the very quality of the individual’s subjective life”, but whose “structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience”.126 Rather, this structuring totality must appear in a ghostly guise, a realm of ghostly objecthoods which plays on us, haunts us.

46The father, then, cannot truly form social bonds – cannot love as he should, cannot perform a simple act of solidarity with a terrified child – because he is, as an adult and thus as a georgic labourer, haunted by a totality he can never experience, by virtualities which are beyond his ken and which nevertheless structure his life, sending him quite “mad”. He stands with the rigid, frigid adult of “We Are Seven”, a man deprived by his georgic logic of social bonds which offer a pastoral space to “sit and sing to” absent loved ones. Taylor Swift is thus speaking of nothing less than the capacity for social bonds, for solidarity, love, and community under capitalism. But like Wordsworth, and, as I hope to have shown, only through her adoption of a specifically Wordsworthian georgic pastoral, Swift offers us hope: the innocence of the child, unlearned of civility and full of a capacity for imaginative connection, can produce a tentative, fragile, yet affectively powerful bond with the oppressed figure of the cowering girl. It is through her moments of imaginative play (“and we can be pirates”, she sings; “we’ll move to India forever”; “love you to the moon, and to Saturn”)127 – moments of childish, pastoral otium that the georgic disciplinarian would stamp out – that she comes to undo the damage of the georgic adult, through a labour of love.